These Dreams of You

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But now in the Berlin street his unconscious mind understands that none of this about the light is true. His mind understands that light dies like everything else; it’s not the same light at all. It’s a new light from the sun or maybe a star that already has died sometime during the thousands of years that its light was en route. He understands that what’s constant isn’t light but shadow, that it’s the shadows which are the same regardless of what light casts them. Songs are more transient than light because, unlike light that bleaches the earth or sears the flesh, a song never leaves a trace except with whatever listener can or will attest to it. The listener becomes not just a collaborator with the singer, he becomes the keeper of the song, seizing possession of it from the singer; the listener knows hearing the song more than the singer can claim singing it. If light is a ghost picture that will disappear, time is a child’s game of telephone, humming at the beginning of the line a melody transformed by a series of listeners to an altogether other melody at the end — and then who’s to say it wasn’t that final melody all along?

Nonetheless, in such moments of light and song, past and present coincide. The deepest cell of memory’s catacomb is more accessible to Zan than the most shallow; he remembers more vividly the quality of light at a given moment forty years ago than the name of someone he met yesterday. Zan has become frightened by his memory’s daily, even hourly insurrections. He’s become as terrified by the prospect of dementia as he is by all the other prospects that terrify him — more, of course, because in memory lies the self’s archeological remains. Almost idly, Zan has considered some plan by which someone euthanizes him before he allows madness to consume him. But when you have children, you don’t enjoy the luxury of any melodrama other than the one you’re actually living through.